The Poetry of Pablo Saborío

absurdist poetry

The table
no time for its
existentialism
and absurd
chair leaning against
the table’s futile stance.
I’m a pragmatic man
so I have no use for knowing
myself.
The table
studies its own nature
by looking at its askew shade.
Chair, somberly
contemplating suicide
because it wants to remove
its painfully ingrown nails.
Paradoxically they keep it alive,
in form, in function.
I have only one reality and the clarity of purpose.
My furniture’s
introspection
is a trifling problem
in my busy condition.
The table has begun questioning things.
It likes it when I leave Camus
on its surface.
I hear the creaky whisper, quoting:
‘the human wooden heart has a tiresome tendency
to label as fate only what crushes it.’
Absurdly, the chair stares at the modernity
of my modus operandi.
I cannot be stopped to wonder.
Progress is my mission.
The table is a stranger to itself.
The chair competes
for my attention.
I have appetites that the world
cannot satisfy.
Table is dissatisfied with its lucidity,
through logic the chair has
arrived at the conclusion that
knowledge is a form of chaos.
I’m a man of the world in spite of everything.
In spite of poverty, war, injustice or
my furniture’s uncertainty and their long
episodes of incoherent silence.

Some people think this thing will burn their eyes.
So brave they stare at the thinghood of the thing.
They say this stuff is a knife of pain and a cutting flame.
So brave they stare at the sharpness of its shape.

Some people think this object will blister their skin.
So brave they touch the surface of the structure.
They say this stuff is a sun of swelling suffering and a sea seething with steam.
So brave they touch the furnace of its frenzy.

Some people think this entity will poison their tongue.
So brave they taste the entirety of the whole.
They say this stuff is a gulp of gunpowder and a drop of death.
So brave they taste the viscosity of its violence.

I bumped into the city, the bastard.
Looking around the snow – remembering
my tongue melting as ice in Lascaux and fossilized
toothpicks near the ancient campfire.
I was in Iceland and got drunk,
looking at the cloudless that would die
before the sky reached Sweden.
I have been on the toilet all day,
working, theorizing, and it came
out looking like Nobel’s head,
one day
I will sit beneath a giant tree and forget
my existence as grass never did.
I see why the intellectuals
are enchanted by doom.
But why worship definition as
a totem almighty menacing godly cult.
I see why the poets cancel death
and write lyrics for the music
of meaningless wind.
I observe the visionaries
about to detonate with their unclean secret
like a grenade in their chests . But they can’t,
never finding sunshine in communication,
sadness has overwhelmed language
leaving behind a thin vicissitude
of smoke.

There is no method for definition: to learn how to define. Definition is a consequence of imitation, its foundation so deeply grounded in our perceptual models of reality that any reform would only be an aberration of the original fortuity. We learnt to use a system of language through imitation and even the precision of mathematics remains illusory as a result of being an imposed code of rules embedded in the ambiguous amalgam of imitative language.

I would live,
dedicate my entire life
to defining a single word
properly – justly.
That word would be:
melancholy
I do have other candidates,
perhaps I would define another
still stranger word: mysterious.
What is mysterious?
That which cannot be grasped intellectually.
That which is still unknown, unexplained,
perhaps the truly mysterious is
that which can never be explained by thought,
that which is intrinsically unknowable.
Here I am defining a word with other words.
But I would not stop there.
I would access zones of intuition,
a series of instruments predating language,
like an amulet that contains an entire cosmology
or a monolith that served as genesis to historical memory.

I would anchor my word to other unreliable words,
vague words that by their very nature would
serve as examples of the intangibility
of my definition for mysterious.
I would, for example, make mysterious
synonymous with Life, Happiness, Nirvana, etc
ect.

Who chases the myth
while drenched
in the blood
of the primordial hunt?
Who has placed a hyphen
between Sky and I
to sense the aura
of a blue atmosphere
as a newer skin?
Who will concentrate
all language
into one singular word
that falls heavy
as a meteorite
into the sands
of nocturnal desert?
Who will endlessly
double the depth
of one earth suspended
in the night?
Who will reduce
consciousness
to a milligram
of image?
Who has made
a door from odor
through which memory
walks out
into open land?
Who will unearth
mankind and root
childhood back
in the curl
of a cloud?
Who will find
this poem hidden
from the glare of knowledge
waiting in the shadows
of their touch?

I dreamt last night that god had reincarnated into a stone.
How it happened is hard to explain
but it was in the US, of all places!
Then I started scratching off the light.
There was nothing left except the immoral space of neutrality
and I began to move amongst cocks
and paradise raw.
I began writing a poem, in the dream
every last stanza
rhyming with the word

thaw

I hardly ever rhyme my verse.
It was strange.
That god would have chosen
the US, of all places.

But I can’t seem to let it go.
The poem, with 4 or 5 stanzas.
Alliteration aligned cosmically.
Even with shadows circling
a verb. I woke up at noon, processing
the real. Honestly, I did not want to wake
up chained to daylight.

But now I’m at
Leigh Ledare’s exhibition
trying to recall
what kind of poem could I
have written amongst cocks
and paradise raw.